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Dimitri Nakassis, of the U of T’s classics department, was lying in a hospital bed when his wife told him the news this fall: The MacArthur Foundation had selected the classical archeologist for its prestigious fellowship. The award comes with an $800,000 no-strings-attached grant. We spoke with Nakassis from his current home in Boulder, Colo., about his work so far, and his plans for the future.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Can you tell me about your work, explain what you do?

I’m interested in early Greek cultures, their archeology, their history, their literature. I mostly work on the Late Bronze Age in Greece, a period also sometimes called the Mycenaean period. I study these palatial, literate societies, and I’m really interested in how they work from the inside out.

And you focus on people outside the palace?

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One way of thinking about the Mycenaean world, and it’s a reasonable way to start, is to look at officials who are named in (tablets documenting palace administration). What I did was I said, “OK, we understand the officials pretty well — we think. But what about all these other people that appeared in the tablets? They’re not given official titles, they’re only listed by personal name. Let’s try to understand who these people are, what they’re doing, and why they’re doing it.”

Why did you want to learn more about these people?

It provides you with a totally different way of understanding how the palace worked. Instead of thinking of the palace as this bureaucratic, hard force that exerts its will on society at large, thinking instead of the palace as a place where individuals of different resources, that have different agendas, come together, interact and probably compete.

How did you feel when you found out you won?

You have no idea you’ve been nominated. The whole process is very hush-hush, so you have no reason to expect that you’re in the running. It was really hard to understand that I had actually won it, because you have no expectation, there’s no idea, there’s nothing that prepares you for it. It just seems like a really strange, surreal thing.

How did your wife tell you?

I was in the hospital getting some tests. My health is fine, but I didn’t know that at the time. I’m lying in this hospital bed and I’m kind of feeling sorry for myself. My wife comes in and she says, “I have some good news; do you want to hear it now, or do you want to hear it after the procedure?” I said I want to hear it now, because I wanted to hear some good news. And then she told me. We were obviously both really happy. I think I probably asked her, “Really?” a couple of times.

Do you have a plan for the money?

I don’t yet. I’m going to use it for research. I can say that. I’m not going to use it to buy myself a really big car or something like that. My thinking is that the whole point of the money is to enable me to do work that I wouldn’t be able to do otherwise. I don’t want to rush into anything. I’m not going to get another shot at one of these things. So I need to make sure that when I do spend the money I’m getting maximum impact from it.

Are you hoping to do one big-scale project?

I’ve started thinking about areas that I think are understudied that would be a good place to start a long-term project.

One possibility would be to focus on domestic architecture. This doesn’t sound super glamorous, but one of the things that we have very little of in the Mycenaean world are houses. Just regular houses that have been excavated. In other periods and other places we have lots of houses that have been excavated, and they’re extremely useful for understanding things like social structure, economic activity, all kinds of things. The household is in many ways the building block of these ancient, and modern, societies.

Another possibility would be to think about people living on the bottom end of the social scale. In another interview I called this the 99 per cent. We have better evidence for how people on the top of the social scale lived than we do for people on the bottom end of the scale. If you’re going to understand how a society works you can’t just focus on the top tier of the social stratum.

How do you feel being called a genius?

I’m a little uncomfortable with the label. My work has benefitted from a lot of collaboration. I’m not planning on going around calling myself a genius. But I’m glad the MacArthur Foundation recognized my work and the area I’m working in as important and interesting. I think it’s important that people understand, the study of the ancient past is not something that sits still. It’s constantly changing and we’re getting new information all the time and we’re coming up with better interpretations all the time.

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